DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Kevin Harvick sat up on the No. 29 pit box, next to his crew chief's wife and son, wearing a heavy coat to ward off the cold. His yellow race car sat on pit road, in first place during the second of two red flags called due to a hole that emerged in the Daytona International Speedway surface.

At the time, there was a debate along pit road as to whether NASCAR should try to resume the event and complete the final 38 laps. Despite his position, Harvick had no hesitation about what needed to be done.

“

We just thought we had the car to beat and I just zigged when I should have zagged.

”

-- KEVIN HARVICK

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"I want to finish it racing, that is what I want to do," he said. "Our car has been good. Everything may go sour, but I would love to finish it."

Those words proved prophetic. The Richard Childress Racing standard-bearer had easily the best car for much of Sunday's Daytona 500, leading seven times for a race-best 41 laps. But a slow pit stop and a drafting miscalculation left the No. 29 team with a seventh-place finish that tasted somewhat sour after the position Harvick had been in earlier in the event.

"I think we had the best car all night long," crew chief Gil Martin said. "We were one of the few cars that could come from the back to the front. There were several good cars, no doubt. But it just wasn't meant to be."

And yet, for an RCR team that failed to place a driver in the Chase last season, the Daytona 500 proved something of a validation. The team endured a painful rebuilding program last spring and summer, shuffling personnel and changing the way it builds its cars. That process produced positive results at the end of the season, when the organization's three top drivers each recorded a handful of strong finishes that gave the team hope for a brighter 2010.

At Daytona, RCR looked like a different entity than the one that slogged through much of last year. Harvick won the season-opening Budweiser Shootout, and the No. 29 car's strength throughout Speedweeks made it one of the top candidates to win the 500. Harvick's effort Sunday was almost matched by that of teammate Clint Bowyer, who led eight times for 37 laps and placed fourth.

In the end, neither found the right drafting combination to beat eventual winner Jamie McMurray. But with the three cars in the top 11 -- Jeff Burton finished 11th -- competition director Scott Miller found it hard to not be pleased.

"Circumstances always have to be on your side to win this thing, and they didn't end up being on ours at the end," Miller said. "But we definitely had cars to win the race, and we've got to be happy about that. If you get over the disappointment of not winning when you had a real good chance at it, and really look at the overall picture, we've got to be happy with how we came out of here."

Of course, the drivers wanted a little more. In the final drafting scrum, where McMurray shot away from everyone and Dale Earnhardt Jr. muscled his way through the pack to finish second, Harvick wasn't happy with the way Carl Edwards went to the middle and "jammed it all up," in his estimation.

"We just thought we had the car to beat," Harvick said, "and just zigged when I should have zagged."

Bowyer made a mistake of his own, choosing the outside line on the final restart when his teammate was on the inside. "Probably in hindsight it wasn't the best decision," he said, "but the [No. 33] Chevrolet was very strong and we had a lot of fun. This is the second year in a row we've had a fourth-place finish here at Daytona. Hopefully we can get a little bit better."

Had the race ended at the second red flag, after vocal protestations from drivers about how much damage the hole was doing to their cars, the result for Harvick at least would have been very different. But the No. 29 team understood NASCAR's decision to patch the hole again and try to complete the race.

"There was no question in my mind," Martin said. "NASCAR wasn't going to have all these fans sit out here in the cold and do everything and then not go race. Whether the hole came back or not, they were going to race. I think everybody pretty well knew that. I was lobbying that it was unsafe, but it didn't go very far."